Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time

> What should I preach? That they're victims and screwed because of accident of geography/genetics? Is that a useful framework for life?

> Whats the alternative for those less fortunate?

(disclaimer: atheist)

Your stance is a classic of church thinking: remove the agency from the people in the situation, and delegate it to god, saying he will fix the problem __somehow__, but they need'nt involve themselves.

The alternative is honesty and historical accuracy. To try to conceal or ignore what forces in their past have done to minimize them is to make it impossible for them to decide for themselves how they want to deal with these problems--you're removing their agency.

Maybe they'll choose to dedicate their lives to researching genetic problems, or to correcting social injustice, raising awareness of subconscious bias or changing how certain systems in our culture purposefully minimize portions of the population.

This attitude, that being kind to those around them will bring change, while noble, is incredibly naive and shortsighted. Nearly every major social change in United States history was brought about through groups of people uniting and demonstrating their combined force, demanding the rights they'd been denied.

> You can say that you teach them the system is unfair will help them break it. But that amounts to political indoctrination if you're not careful.

Your alternative will lead to stunted critical thinking, and serves only to prevent the questions many deconverting folk have asked of the god they believed in: "How is this fair?", "How could you let this happen?", "How will you fix this?"

Isn't everything a bias in some way? But point taken. I don't attend multiple churches, I attend one, and it, like others of its ilk, has been under attack, so observations are of course my own. But if you want to mute the language some, let's s/strong//, s/freedom/choice, and s/vibrant/well-attended.

I became an atheist/agnostic as a teenager and now in my late 20's I have slowly come back to religion. So I am really interested in this topic.

My comment is specifically about online atheist communities, because I think they are often toxic to both religion and to atheism itself. A lot of these communities are hyper-focused on fundamentalism, to their own detriment.

These online atheists communities can be very unfortunate. Your noble search for the truth leads you to question religion - but then you get caught in an echo chamber spending a lot of energy hating on others for their beliefs. A noble pursuit devolved into hatred and groupthink. On the other hand, fundamentalists took a religion which preaches love and acceptance and twisted it into something bitter and hateful. I think it's kind of poetic how much those two communities mirror each other.

The fixation on fundamentalism is a combination of two things. First, there are people from those fundamentalist churches who were damaged in some way and have now swung way to the opposite extreme of hating all religion. They grew up learning to see the world through rigid dogma, and online atheist communities tend to be fairly dogmatic themselves. Not hard to see the appeal there. Second, and probably more common, are atheists who never had any close contact with fundamentalism but they justify their beliefs by taking on the low-hanging fruit. It is very easy to pick on young-earth creationists, vehement anti-gay groups, prosperity gospel, etc. Those groups' thinking really does rely on fear and hate, things that the bible actually tells us to reject.

What happens when you tell one of those angry atheists that yes, you're a Christian, but you also find evolution to be very cool, you know that the universe is billions of years old, you are pro choice, and you don't believe everything in the bible literally happened? Well, they aren't really sure what to do with you. Because they spend all their time congratulating themselves for being smarter than the lowest common denominator of religion, they aren't really able to have a more sophisticated conversation about their beliefs.

As a religious person, it is a bit frustrating that you never see atheists confronting the great theologists and religious philosophers - Origen, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or even contemporary thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre. If Christians' beliefs are really so shallow and stupid, those guys should be super easy to refute, right? They think that all Christians are anti-science when Christian monks were pivotal in the discovery of genetics and the big bang theory, among other scientific achievements. They ignore that some giants of Enlightenment philosophy, like Descartes and Spinoza, were attempting to use new rational methods to affirm the existence of God in their major works.

The problem is, when you are an atheist engaging in the really complex arguments posed by the most intelligent and eloquent religious people of history, the waters become very muddy. You might even have to concede, just a little bit, that you take your atheism on faith, too. It's much easier to feel good about bashing the usual suspects - Joel Osteen, the 700 Club, Westboro Baptist and friends. And so a lot of people get sucked into that low-level discourse, and never get a chance to make the exhilarating journey back to religion. I don't really care if someone stays an atheist, many good people are atheists. But I do care if they never get a chance to see the promise of religion because of toxic echo chambers and groupthink.

As a religious person, I don't hate outspoken atheists. In fact, I very much respect them - they are people who care deeply about the truth. In that respect, they have something in common with any thoughtful religious person.

I read a book by Eckhart Tolle that gave me two takeaways. The first was that the book was full of nonsense. The second was that it was clear why this nonsense was so effective for people.

What are the downsides to suspending scientific accuracy for the purposes of doing Aikido?

is people publicly debating your existence good for society as a whole?